Ok..First of all, the curse of the lemon meyer!! But have no fear, you can prevail! Immediately, I mean immediately, I would get that plant out of the soil ASAP.... That soil your using, has been the DEATH of all mine when I first began. It holds way too much water, a perched water table which citrus HATE in our growing regions, no matter what the product claims, and it holds way to much residue fertilizer salts that can turn leaf tips brown. Your roots should look a healthy white. Take a peak while you are add it, if not, it is killing your tree fast. Therefore the branches dying..Root rot kills the branches, but first the leaves drop, usually green and or yellow..The leafs drop green if under watered and root damaged has taken hold.. Is there a way you can STRAIN out all the peat moss in that soilless mix you bought? Please let me know..I will give you a great idea? Do you have quick access to good nursery mix? You live in Ohio? You need to keep your tree on the dry side with such a lack of sunlight, and make sure it absolutely needs watering before you do it again.. Let us leave it at here, until you change the soil..Nothing else is going to help it, until you first take this step. That soilless mix is junk! Sorry..:-( Let me know when you have done the first step, and or if you want too.. I will then guide you from there..You NEED to put that plant in a FAST draining soilless mix, that dries out rather rapidly. One that is porous and provides great gas exchange after each watering. One that allows the salts to flush out at each watering. One that allows you to feed at every watering. One that provides oxygen and does not suffocate the roots..Does not take too long to dry out, or compact:-) There might still be hope. How much sun does it get? How are the temps? What size, kind of pot is it in? How long has it been taking the soil mix to dry out? What kind of water do you provide it with? Do you use vinager? What kind of analysis, or how high is the ph of your water? What are your cultural habits in detail.. Mike

Normally figs are pruned while they are dormant. Some people do so shortly after they go dormant, and some wait until a few weeks before the plants break dormancy. Before I knew better I sometimes pruned my trees after they had budded out in the spring. They seemed to do fine in spite of this. I'm sure it did set them back a bit though, but I'm in the deep South with a pretty long growing season. Your tree will likely grow straight up this year, and it sounds like it might even produce some main crop figs. It may ripen a breba or two, but it will likely drop them. What variety is your new fig? Next year before it breaks dormancy you can prune it back to whatever height you want the branching to take place, and it should branch out just fine. You will have some nice cuttings at that point too if you want to make some new trees. Good luck. Henry

Sorry for the late reporting. The July 4th holiday schedule in my house was quite crazy. I'm happy to report that my fig tree started to grow again! It was absent for the last 3 months. I have attached a picture showing new buds on all the tips. Terry, thanks for the tip of using sun shade. I actually used this trick when planting a young guava tree, which worked really well. However, the fig tree is facing a canyon, where the wind is very strong. I haven't been able to get the canopy staying in place, but have some other idea to try this weekend. As the old leaves continue to curl and drop, I think I have to try this trick with the watering change. I agree with you on the compost vs. chemical fertilizer. It's quite clear to me now that I'm guilty of over-fertilizing the fig tree, so I stopped doing it except some coffee grounds outside of drip line to amend the soil. BTW, my soil is ph7, very uniform, so not sure if I should use agricultural lime. HD, thanks a lot again for the great tip of coffee grounds. That's a lot of information on coffee grounds from your link! I'm not a coffee drinker, so instead of getting coffee grounds from Starbucks, I've been getting about 1/2 lb daily from my office for more than a week. I actually have a question following your mulching tip. The fig is sitting close to an edge of a slope. I did pull up ground cover and extended the mulch area away from slope, but kind of debating if I should do the same toward slope since ground cover is there to prevent soil erosion from rain. The ground cover seems improved the soil quite a bit. For the places without ground cover, the soil was really dry and barren, while the soil under ground cover were moist and rich. I've found fig roots as far as 2.5-3 feet away from trunk. Do you think I should replace more ground cover with mulch? One thing I don't know is if ground cover will compete with fig on water and nutrients. However, in places where ground cover and fig roots co-exist, the soil is better than those with fig roots alone. I've been using dripping from buckets to better water the tree, which seems to be working well. I also plan to install automatic dripping converting my sprinklers. The challenge I am not able to solve yet is ground cover and fruit trees need to be on two different schedules, but I have only one zone covering that space. Here is a link I found very informative to calculate how much water fruit trees need, which I miscalculated really badly before. I realized that I was giving my fig less than half of what it needs! http://homeorchard.ucdavis.edu/The_Big_Picture/Irrigation/ Bud, your tree is in a much better shape, as it grows really well. My tree after 3 years is less than 5 feet tall. However, I wonder if both of us are guilty of over-fertilizing the tree. From my reading, too much nitrogen during its fruiting time will lead to premature dropping of fruits. Does it apply to your case?

I live in South Carolina in zone 7, so my info may not help, but our tree is well over 100 years old, been on our family farm for generations. All I do is take a green cutting in the spring, make a diagonal cut right below where I've removed a leaf, dip it in a rooting powder, this stick this in wet potting soil in a clear plastic cup (so I can see when the roots are forming) which I've poked about 5 or 6 holes in the bottom, place all this into a gallon zip lock storage baggie, mist inside the bag 3 or 4 times, seal it up and put it in a place where it will get indirect sunlight. I usually get about 75 percent rootage on my cuttings. You just have to be sure and acclimate them before you take them outta the bags, you know, after they form roots, open the bag a little, wait about a week, open it a little more, wait another week, etc., until its opened all the way. Now I do get some hard headed cuttings that after they form roots, they don't wanna be taken outt the bags (wilt everytime I take them out), so then, I just place them under a 1/2 - 1 gallon pickle jar and wait until they perk back up and then see how they do on their own. I have read that some figs will only root on dormant cuttings like Al above stated, so I'm planning on trying that this winter. Hope this helps and good luck, Joel. Oh yeah, I remove all the leaves from the cuttings except the top 2 and the process can take around 2-3 weeks or longer.